Tag Archives: Cleveland Cinematheque

The Cinematheque offers unusual and interesting movies this weekend, which is, of course, its mission. A documentary by Frederick Wiseman, At Berkeley, shows Thursday at 6:45 pm and Friday at 7:30 pm. Every year I teach a class on education reform at Case Western and show Wiseman’s brilliant 1968 doc High School to my students. Wiseman, […]

I should have told you to see To Be or Not to Be at the Cleveland Cinematheque last weekend. There was a big crowd there, anyway, because the Plain Dealer wrote a nice story about the film and the Ernst Lubitsch series it’s a part of. Lubitsch’s films are the best kind: they’re classic works […]

Sarah Polley, a young actress and director, has created another one of those engrossing documentaries (like Still Bill or Searching for Sugar Man) that you want everyone to see because they’re so good. In carefully ordered sequences, she reveals secrets about her family. Or, more accurately, she gets her family members to reveal secrets about […]

I’ve never seen Richard Pryor’s Which Way Is Up? (1977) and expect to try it at the Cleveland Cinematheque tonight or tomorrow (5:15 and 9:45, respectively), forewarned that it’s raunchy. I don’t think I’ve seen any Richard Pryor movies, in fact, a gap I look forward to closing. The Cleveland Plain Dealer made it their […]

I’ll limit my Cinematheque recommendations this week to the one film I’ve already seen–Kolya, a Czech Academy-Award winner from 1996. Frequently, it seems, the foreign-film Oscar goes to the most sentimental and accessible of the candidates, i.e., the “heartwarming” one. Kolya fits that description, but transcends its predictability with humor and charm. It has appealing performances by […]

Some people don’t like black-and-white films. Others hate subtitles. I feel both kinds of people are missing out and should give such cinematic variations a better chance. I also know, though, there’s no accounting for taste and that everyone doesn’t have to like what I like. Silent films fall into the same category. I fear some people got it into their […]

Whenever I get a chance to recommend Buster Keaton, I recommend Buster Keaton. This weekend, I recommend Buster Keaton at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Over the next four weekends, you can see Buster Keaton short films. Tomorrow evening (5:15 pm), three from 1920 and 1921 are playing: “The High Sign,” “One Week,” “Convict 13,” and “The […]

This weekend, abbreviated because of the holiday, offers only three movies, all of them good bets. You can see Ozu once again, as part of the Cinematheque series Marriage a la Ozu, in the 1957 family drama Tokyo Twilight. Less gentle and less benign than other offerings from this Japanese director, it’s also long at […]

I’ve been remiss re the Cinematheque. Sometimes I’m not enthusiastic about any of the films, but I’m writing now, because I can be excited about a couple offerings. It’s Yasujiro Ozu again, this time 1956’s Early Spring. (Late Spring, Mid-Winter, Fall Equinox–write your own Ozu-of-the -Similar-Title joke.) This one’s a tad steamier than most, using […]

I have fond memories of Jean de Florette and its sequel, Manon of the Spring,which came out in 1986. The brilliant Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil conspire against a thin, handsome (even with a hunchback!) Gerard Depardieu and, playing his daughter, the spectacularly beautiful Emmanuelle Beart, to acquire valuable land in gorgeous Provence in the 1920s. These films are suspenseful, […]